The best restaurants in London right now

Books to read on holiday

You can get lost trying to navigate the sleepy backwaters of Kerala, taste unidentifiable foods on the streets of Ho Chi Minh, and drive for miles across the wild plains of Africa, spotting nothing but wildebeest. Spend lazy days lying in a hammock strung between palm trees on an exotic beach and hazy evenings drinking the local brew in a shack in some hard-to-get-to village. Revisit a treasured spot or discover somewhere new - all through the pages of a good book.

Stories evoke a sense of place and reveal secrets about a destination, so here's our selection of inspiring novels set in foreign lands, from Alaska to New Guinea, for armchair travellers and jet-setters.

Last year The Broken Road, the final instalment of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy about walking across Europe in the 1930s, was posthumously published. During that book's long gestation, Nick Hunt was preparing his own tribute, by following on foot the route described in the three volumes. Vivid and hard-won, Walking the Woods and the Water reveals a diminished Europe, where tarmac roads give Hunt shin splints and wear out his boots. The book becomes a report on the kindness of strangers in a cold, sodden landscape. The approach to Istanbul brings welcome relief from northern gloom.

Quitting his job in the City and selling his house, Conor Woodman took up the ultimate commercial challenge: to get around the world on 80 trades and come back with a profit. Among the transactions in The Adventure Capitalist is the bartering of Sudanese camels for Zambian coffee and Chinese jade for South African wine. Other trades involve seafood, surfboards, teak and horses. Partly an analysis of global markets, partly a traveller's tale that reaches all the way back to fellow merchants Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, this is an exciting, inspiring book.

Acclaimed for Running for the Hills, a book describing his childhood in Wales, and A Single Swallow, in which he traces the bird's migration patterns, Horatio Clare has now produced a great book about the sea and those who sail on it. Down to the Sea in Ships is a fabulous account of voyages on two cargo ships, one from Felixstowe to LA via the Suez Canal, the other from Antwerp to Montreal, crossing the Atlantic in winter storms. There is Conradian insight in Clare's portrayal of the crews to which he is supernumerary, from the captain who hums as he negotiates narrow channels to the first mate constantly crunching carrots. Well-informed accounts of the mechanics of shipping, together with lyrical descriptions of dolphins and whales, make it a pleasure to read. But it is Clare's own psyche that is most interesting. The risks he takes are not ones of derring-do but involve acute mindfulness of the people around him and the space they inhabit.

The Voices of Marrakech by Elias Canetti Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti became famous with his Crowds and Power (1960), which dealt with the question of why the mob obeys its rulers, but he also wrote a little-known travel book called The Voices of Marrakesh, which was first published in German in 1968. In it he records a few weeks spent in the Moroccan city in the late 1950s, capturing in vivid prose the throng of its central square full of beggars, spice traders and camel merchants. The most important part of the book describes the Mellah, or Jewish quarter, which is now all but gone.

To the Island by Meaghan Delahunt In To the Island, Orange-prize nominated Meaghan Delahunt tells the story of Lena, who travels with her small son from Australia to the Greek island of Naxos, in search of her father Andreas, whom she has never met. The result is a novel with shades of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, in which the dark secrets of the past stand in sharp contrast to the brightness of the sun.

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss I first came across Sarah Moss's work in the novel Nightwaking (2010), wowed by prose which really got to the heart of parenting young children. It's another treat to discover her travel book describing a lifelong interest in Iceland. Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland is focused on a period (2008/9) in which Moss took a university job in the country, moving her family over there only to get caught up in Iceland's sovereign debt crisis (which halved her salary in a week) and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. A thoughtful and moving description of a country and a family in transition, from a writer to watch.

Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills by Neil Ansell 'I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild creatures that became my society.' So writes Neil Ansell of the cottage Penlan in Wales which is the subject of Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills. A moving account of the pains and pleasures of cutting oneself off from modern life.

The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombiaby Michael Jacobs Among writers who take South America as their subject, Michael Jacobs has no peers. The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia, which sees him travel up the Magdalena River from the Caribbean to its Andean source, is as full of danger and insight as his previous books. Encounters with FARC guerrillas, a meeting with Gabriel García Márquez and a personal journey into loss sit alongside historical accounts of those who have lived on the river's shores or have been pitched into its waters, victims of political violence.

Istanbul by Richard Tillinghast 'Istanbul has its characteristic sounds - ships' horns from the Bosphorus, the cries of seagulls, taxis hooting, workmen hammering away at copper and brass in ateliers around the Grand Bazaar, street vendors hawking their wares, and the call to prayer, that haunting recitation.' Richard Tillinghast's Istanbul is a well-wrought and admirably clear guide to the history and present-day reality of the Turkish city. Part of Haus Publishing's excellent new Armchair Traveller series, it is just the book for a newcomer to Istanbul, before one moves on to the work of its greatest describer, Orhan Pamuk, to whom Tillinghast devotes a chapter.

Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin In Everything is Broken, published last year, Emma Larkin gave a harrowing account of the 2008 cyclone that hit Burma and the near-genocidal response to it of the country's military rulers, who blocked international aid. Now an earlier book by this intrepid figure (she writes under a pseudonym to aid ease of movement within Burma) has been reissued, and rightly so. In Finding George Orwell in Burma, Larkin follows in the footsteps of the novelist, who lived in the country as a colonial policeman for five years in the 1920s. It is fascinating to learn that Burma's underground intellectuals, followers of opposition politican Aung San Suu Kyi, call Orwell 'the prophet'. Like her illustrious predecessor, Larkin is a beacon for truth.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum by Katherine Boo The slum of Annawadi is near Mumbai airport on a stretch of road where 'new India and old India collided and made new India late'. In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, award-winning New Yorker journalist Katherine Boo gets deep into a world of garbage pickers, prostitutes, police, thieves and wannabe entrepreneurs, all living in the shadow of glitzy hotels. It's a powerful and sobering book, but also a funny one, as when we meet a drug-crazed scavenger who talks to the hotels: 'I know you're trying ot kill me, you ****ing Hyatt!'

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigera by Noo Saro-Wiwa The family of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and activitist handed by the Nigerian regime of Sani Abacha, is fast becoming a literary dynasty. His son, Ken Jr, wrote a memoir called In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), and now from his daughter Noo Saro-Wiwa comes Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, which sees an English-educated young woman journeying from the chaos of Lagos to the calm of ancient rainforests. There is mordant humour in her depiction of such events and places as a Nigerian dog show and the empty Transwonderland Amusement Park - Nigeria's answer to Disneyland.

The Pigeon Wars of Damacus by Marius Kociejowski Marius Kociejowski's last book, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool (2004), was an account of characters at the periphery of Syrian society. It received great acclaim ('destined to become a travel classic' said the Times Literary Supplement), and seemed to suggest that Syria was opening up. Kociejowski's new book, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus, sees him return to Syria during political unrest. A chance encounter leads him to the competitive world of Damascene pigeon fanciers: in the whirring wings and fluttering feathers of the birds, he finds subtle analogies for the bitter intrigues and holy passions of Middle Eastern politics. It's a dark and brilliant book from a writer to watch.

Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World by Mitchell Zukoff At the end of World War II, a US Army plane crashed in an area of New Guinea populated only by Stone Age tribes. Nineteen on board were killed but three survived: a dashing officer, a sergeant with head injuries, and a beautiful member of the Women's Army Corps. As Mitchell Zukoff's thrilling Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World relates, the trio trekked through the jungle for seven weeks until they were rescued. An incredible story that will satisfy readers who like their travel served up hard boiled.

The Pharoah's Shadow: Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt by Anthony Sattin 'It would be difficult to demonstrate that there are still, in these places, survivals from Pharaonic Egypt, but it would be dangerous to assume that there aren't any, either.' This quote from Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart stands at the head of Anthony Sattin's magnificent The Pharoah's Shadow: Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt. First published more than a decade ago, and now reissued, Sattin's freewheeling, thoughtful and poetic narrative finds those ancient survivals as much in people's personalities as in ruined temples.

Alaskan Travels by Edward Hoagland I have admired the American travel writer Edward Hoagland ever since reading his African Callipe (1981), which describes a journey to Sudan. A few years after that book came out, Hoagland began making numerous trips to Alaska, having fallen in love with a nurse who worked the rural settlements, from the outskirts of Anchorage to the banks of the Yukon River. Alaskan Travels describes Hoagland's encounters with trappers, miners and other inhabitants of 'America's last best place'.

The Urban Circus: Travels with Mexico's Malabaristas by Catriona Rainsford In The Urban Circus: Travels with Mexico's Malabaristas, Catriona Rainsford writes about the country she made her home and the boyfriend she found there - one of the wandering Malabarista street performers of the title. It's a wild and extraordinary book which encompasses fire-juggling, peyote-taking, attacks by narco gangsters, even a spell in jail and deportation for the author. Highly recommended, but I'd rather read than live it.

The Telling Room: A Tale of Passion, Revenge and the World's Finest Cheese by Michael Paterniti

When American food writer Michael Paterniti came upon a reference to an extremely expensive Spanish cheese called Paramo de Guzmán, he decided to go to Guzmán (pop. 80) in Castile and seek out cheesemaker Ambrosio Molino. Soon becoming part of village life, Paterniti is invited to join the locals for wine, cheese and story-telling in the bodega, a man-made cave known as the Telling Room. Relocating his young family to Spain, he begins to pen The Telling Room: A Tale of Passion, Revenge and the World's Finest Cheese. But he has not accounted for the fact that Molino had apparently plotted to murder his closest friend, or that the villagers will do almost anything to keep him from hearing the next part of the story. The result is not just a book about Spain and its food, but an investigation into the art of narrative itself.

Paddle: A Long Way Around Ireland by Jasper Winn Jasper Winn's Paddle: A Long Way Around Ireland is an amusing account of kayaking round the 1,000-mile Irish coast. Winn hopes to be camping on remote headlands and islands but the weather is far too bad for that. He ends up spending rather a lot of time playing music in coastal pubs. What's not to like?

The Eighth Continent - Life, Death and Discovery in a Lost World by Peter Tyson Madagascar is 'a land where lizards scream and monkey-like lemurs sing songs of inexpressible beauty' as Peter Tyson has it in Madagascar: The Eighth Continent - Life, Death and Discovery in a Lost World. There's more to it than that, of course, with a variety of unique ecological habitats to investigate on the island, an uncertain political landscape, and a future perilously pitched between Madagascar's various guises as environmental nirvana, agricultural horn of plenty and cache of valuable minerals. Now out in a new edition - part of Bradt's foray into travel narrative as opposed to straight guidebooks - Tyson's book blends adventure, science and history into an elegant whole.

The Bandit on the Billiard Table by Alan Ross First published in 1954, Alan Ross's The Bandit on the Billiard Table is packed with exceptionally vivid descriptions of a journey by train and car through Sardinia in the early 1950s, a time when bandits still operated on the island and billiards was 'one of the great Sardinian occupations'. If you liked those rural Italian scenes in The Godfather, then this is the book for you. Ross, who died in 2001, was best known as a poet and editor, but it may well be that his travel books, which also include Time Was Away: A Notebook in Corsica (1948), Winter Sea (1998) and Reflections on Blue Water (2000), are in fact his greatest achievements.

Island Summers: Memories of a Norwegian Childhood by Tilly Culme-Seymour I confidently predict that Tilly Culme-Seymour's book Island Summers: Memories of a Norwegian Childhood will win some literary prizes this year. It tells the story of Småhølmene - don't ask me to pronounce it - an island in the Skagerrak bought by her grandmother in 1947, apocryphally in exchange for a mink coat. I'm envious of the fishing and berry-picking, the little wooden cabin and, yes, of having such a subject to write about, too.

Constantinople by Edmondo de Amicis In Constantinople, Italian writer Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908) describes a visit he made to the city in 1874. The book begins with a powerful description of arriving by ship as the view, shrouded in mist, slowly unveils. In his introduction, Umberto Eco writes that many of the sights de Amicis records are no longer there, notably (on the Galatea bridge) the 'two endless streams of humanity crossing in contrary directions from dawn to dusk, the sedan chair, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, from which an Armenian lady peeped out, the elderly Turk wearing a muslin turban and a sky-blue kaftan walking beside a Greek on horseback followed by his dragoman, the dervish with his tall conical hat... the eunuch marching in front of the harem carriage, the African slave carrying a monkey, a storyteller dressed like a necromancer...'

Meander: East to West along a Turkish River by Jeremy Seal Now out in paperback,A Fez of the Heartauthor Jeremy Seal's Meander: East to West along a Turkish River is already making a name for itself among Turkey aficionados. With a collapsible canoe, Seal follows the Meander as it swerves and veers from its headwaters to the Aegean. As Sara Wheeler has observed, this is 'not one of those man-books soaked in testosterone', but if you do want that, try Phil Harwood's astonishing Canoeing the Congo (Summersdale, £9.99).

Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey into Angola by Daniel Metcalfe Discounting Paul Theroux's recentThe Last Train to Zona Verde and a good Bradt guide, Daniel Metcalfe'sBlue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey into Angola is the first English-language book of travel writing about Angola for nearly a decade. It's a startling, wonderfully written portrait of a country flowing with petrodollars yet still suffering the effects of years of civil war. From the moment he's told his luggage has gone to East Timor, Metcalfe suffers the endless indignities to which Angola subjects inhabitants and visitors alike. Theroux describes the capital, Luanda, as hell, and Metcalfe's book confirms this. But the country's huge tourist potential is evident on the trips he makes to the stunning interior. For now, Angola is probably too off-piste even for Condé Nast Traveller readers, but an annex to the book points up the offshore islands of São Tomé and Príncipe as a good destination.

Ivory, Apes and Peacocks: Animals, Adventure and Discovery in the Wild Places of Africa by Alan Root

It's a pleasure to read Ivory, Apes and Peacocks: Animals, Adventure and Discovery in the Wild Places of Africa, now out in paperback. This account of childhood and professional life by the veteran safari film-maker Alan Root is up there with the great African memoirs, taking us from the swashbuckling innocence of wildlife-filming in colonial Kenya to the complexities of recent years, not the least of which was the murder of Root's wife Joan in 2006, probably because of her anti-poaching campaign.

The Stronghold: Four Seasons in the White Mountains of Crete by Xan Fielding

Patrick Leigh Fermor's comrade in arms, Xan Fielding, first saw Crete from the periscope of a submarine. Uncertain what to do when the war ended, he placed an ad in The Times: 'Tough but sensitive ex-classical scholar, ex-secret agent, ex-guerrilla leader, 31, recently reduced to penury through incompatibility with the post-war world: Mediterranean lover, gambler, and general dabbler: fluent French and Greek speaker, some German, inevitable Italian: would do anything unreasonable and unexpected if sufficiently rewarding and legitimate.' But in fact, this extraordinary character returned to Crete to revisit his wartime haunts. The result, in 1953, was The Stronghold: Four Seasons in the White Mountains of Crete. Stylishly recording the minutiae of peasant life, this pioneering book has been reissued with a foreword by Robert Messenger. The same publisher is also releasing Fielding's war memoir, Hide and Seek.

Simply because he is on television, people forget how well Michael Palin writes, as evidenced by his Brazil. But it is BBC resources that enable Palin to get around the country in a way that would be almost impossible for an ordinary travel writer with limited time and resources. A vivid, synoptic take on a vast, unpredictable country, this book holds its own against more self-consciously literary works about Brazil by Peter Robb and others.

'Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you.' Thus DH Lawrence, departing Sicily, where he lived from 1920 to 1922. The passage is quoted in Sicily: A Literary Guide for Travellers, a wonderful text on the literary diversity of the island, as produced both by locals, such as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia, as well as by visitors, including Goethe, Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

The Lure of the Honey Bird: The Storytellers of Ethiopia by Elizabeth Laird

In the late 1990s, Elizabeth Laird was standing on the lawn of the British Council office in Addis Ababa when she had a brainwave, which was to collect oral accounts of Ethiopian folk tales and write them down. In The Lure of the Honey Bird: The Storytellers of Ethiopia, she supplies the often amusing context for the gathering of these stories, in a travel narrative that sees her seeking out jesters, tricksters and zombies, magic cows, hyena kings, and men who grow feathers.

Tim Dee is known for his excellent writing about birdwatching. In Four Fields, his prose takes wing in a different way, as he examines what four fields have meant to him across the years. The fields are in Cambridgeshire (fenland grazing), Zambia (an old colonial farm), Montana (the site where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors killed George Custer and his party in 1876, 'in a battle which as much as anything was a fight over grass') and Ukraine (in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone). It's a brilliant idea, and the book is as passionate, lyrical and intelligent as Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways.

Kipling and theSea: Voyages and Discoveries from North Atlantic to South Pacific by Andrew Lycett

Just a few drops of the vast literary output of Rudyard Kipling are gathered in Kipling and the Sea: Voyages and Discoveries from North Atlantic to South Pacific, but Andrew Lycett's splendid anthology of poetry and prose gives a great sense of Kipling's passion for the briny, whether it be the romance of an eastern-bound clipper, the steam-driven world of merchant shipping, or the mechanical majesty of a dreadnought.

Morocco has long been a magnet for writers and bohemians of one type or another. In Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travellers, Josh Shoemake has put together a wonderfully elegant account of the people and places that have contributed to the exotic allure of its most exciting city. Here in all its tawdry beauty is what William Burroughs called the Interzone, where sex, drugs and rugs are cheap, and the shades of other writers such as Paul and Jane Bowles, Jack Kerouac, Jean Genet and Joe Orton mingle with each other and the local inhabitants.

Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France by Nicholas Shakespeare

At first you might think Nicholas Shakespeare's Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France is one of those World War II woman spy books we've seen so much of. But this is a lot darker and more complicated, delving into the murky past of the author's aunt, who (he discovers) came close to being a collaborator at the same time as being a victim of the uncertainties of the war, as so many women were. A fine book, full of hurried journeys and secret liaisons, by one of Britain's best writers.

The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys Through Modern India by Sally Howard

The story of India rising (in a capitalist sense) has been around for at least two decades now. Countless travel books have grappled with the phenomenon, but Sally Howard's The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys Through Modern India is the first to focus exclusively on sexual experience. Her journey begins in the deep past, in the hill station of Shimla as a seat of sexual licence during the Raj, before taking a look at GIGs (good Indian girls and BIGs (bad Indian girls) in Delhi, as well as a retirement home for eunuchs in Gujurat, cemetery sex in Varanasi, sex clinics in Chennai, and bar girls and worse in Mumbai. There is much eye-watering, mind-boggling stuff besides; it must have been exhausting to research all this. You come away with a strong sense that sexual behaviour in the West is fairly narrow in comparison.

'The sky became cloaked with dust and the sun disappeared into a sodium-like whiteness. Bushes shivered, and formerly listless leaves twisted and flipped like landed mackerel. I tugged the turban over my mouth and the bridge of my nose, and followed Ahmed in search of my camels.' So Alistair Carr starts his journey across the Manga, a remote part of south-eastern Niger, in The Nomad's Path: Travels in the Sahel. Made during a time of Tuareg rebellion, his account combines the lyricism of a poet with the analytical insight of a journalist. The result rightfully takes its place in the long tradition of British desert exploration.

'Everywhere I had ever travelled across the vast expanse of the fabulous country where I was born I had seen devastation...' Searching for somewhere to archive her papers, in 2001, Germaine Greer was taken to an abandoned dairy farm in Queensland. White Beech: The Rainforest Years tells the story of her decade-long battle to rehabilitate the damaged forest of white beeches and other trees she found there. Working with her sister, a botanist, she puts all her remarkable passion and a lot of money into the project.

In The Train in Spain, Christopher Howse details 10 journeys by rail across Spain. Stopping at the tiniest little stations, his sharp eye captures the kind of thing one sees on holiday but rarely reads about in books. During the Zamora to Zafra leg, Howse alights at the old city of Cacères, to find its stone walls somewhat blighted by featureless blocks of flats. And yet, sensory pleasure abounds: 'The hams of Cacères hung patiently in bars, waiting to be eaten. Their fat, dripping at geological speed, was caught in a variety of little vessels designed for the purpose.'

True happiness, declared Henry James, consists in walking through Provence in September, then stretching oneself out 'on the warm ground in some shady hollow [to] listen to the hum of bees and the whistles of melancholy shepherds'. This is from Henry James On Provence, a pocket-sized package of literary brilliance. Here's how he describes a flock following one of those shepherds: 'necessarily expanded, yet keeping at his heels, bending and twisting as it goes, looking rather like the tail of a dingy comet'.

Skidoo: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of the American West by Alex Capus

A new book from Alex Capus is always a pleasure, and Skidoo: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of the American West does not disappoint. In Bodie, California, we learn how the starving Native Americans raided the gifts of food for departing souls left on funeral routes by the Chinese who flocked here when gold was discovered. In Panamint City, silver was found accidentally by a gang hiding out after robbing a stagecoach. In Skidoo itself, saloon owner Hootch Simpson was twice hanged and then decapitated for his part in a drunken bank robbery. All of these tales are told with Capus's customary charm.

As a youngster, Charlie Carroll fell in love with the idea of visiting Tibet, and after the 2008 Beijing Olympics decides to make the idea a reality. After hanging around in Xining waiting for a permit, he ascends the China-Tibet railway (oxygen masks supplied) and finally enters Tibet, where he struggles with bureaucracy and yak-butter tea. Carroll's travels, as related in The Friendship Highway: Two Journeys in Tibet, alternate with an account of Tibetan-born Lobsang's flight from the country in 1989. The two tales come together on the Tibet-Nepal border where Lobsang meets Charlie, and asks for his help to get back into Tibet.

'Everyone between roughly 40 and their mid-seventies today who was born in Spain was born under Franco,' remarks Jeremy Treglown in the introduction to Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936. In a book ranging elegantly between travel writing, history, literary criticism and investigative journalism, Treglown unpicks the puzzle of Spain, especially looking at how novels, paintings and films have tried to interpret and reinterpret events there between the 1930s and the establishment of democracy. In a competitive field, this complements similar titles by Giles Tremlett (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past) and Jason Webster (Guerra: Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War), but with deeper analysis of the arts. All three are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Spain of today.

Travel-writing reference books proliferate: from those that come out of a personal library (Paul Theroux's The Tao of Travel), to the diary-driven (Fergus Fleming's The Traveller's Daybook), to the mother lode (Peter Yapp's big, fat Travellers' Dictionary of Quotation). They've ghosted the genre from the start, when there was a confusion between curiosity and knowledge: Sir John Mandeville's late-medieval, part-fictional Travels was used as a reference book by Columbus, despite extravagant interpolations that make it read more like an anthology. Laura Stoddart's deftly illustrated Off the Beaten Track: A Traveller's Anthology is a nice little flourish in the category, making a good gift, and organising itself, like Theroux's book, on thematic lines such as 'Advice to the Traveller'. Yapp's work, sadly hard to find, instead tells you who said what, about where. It's useful when combined with the gargantuan Columbia Gazetteer of the World, a wonderful but very pricey (£441) A to Z of places.

The questing knight figure, of whom Sir John Mandeville was a real incarnation, pops up in the opening of The Flame Trees of Thika, Elspeth Huxley's account of growing up on a coffee farm in colonial Kenya: 'We set off in an open cart drawn by four whip-scarred little oxen and piled high with equipment and provisions. No medieval knight could have been more closely armoured than were Tilly and I, against the rays of the sun.' Still entrancing after all these years - it was first published in 1959 - Huxley's book is reissued this month.

Bang in the Middle: A Journey to the Heart of the Midlands by Robert Shore

A quip from Voltaire about British beer - 'froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent' - stands as the epigraph for Robert Shore's Bang in the Middle: A Journey to the Heart of the Midlands, which aims to rescue places like Coventry, Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham from the cultural margin. At once light-hearted and serious, Shore presents the Midlands as the engine of English culture and commerce - the cradle of Robin Hood, Shakespeare, the Industrial Revolution, Marmite and Walkers Crisps; and with no binary 'other' like North and South, it continues to shape the rest of the country in its image.

A Short Ride in the Jungle: The Ho Chi Minh Trail by Motorcycle by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent takes us on a bumpy journey in A Short Ride in the Jungle: The Ho Chi Minh Trail by Motorcycle, following the supply route used by the Communist military in the Vietnam War. She dices with lecherous locals, uncovers memories of US bombing raids, slogs through mudslides, and suffers no less than four engine rebuilds of the pink Honda C90 on which she rides, carrying little more than her passport and a spare pair of pants. She makes the 2,000-mile trip from Hanoi to Saigon in six weeks. Both travel narrative and guidebook, her account sits astride those same old polarities of curiosity and knowledge.

Brian Jackman has been writing about the animals and landscapes of Africa for 40 years. In Savannah Diaries, which collects his accounts of game parks, there's a wonderful story of two meetings with legendary safari guide Robin Pope. The first is when Pope is a rookie, apprenticed to Norman Carr, the grand old man of the Luangwa Valley; the second takes place 30 years later, when Jackman joins Pope for a walking safari. Here's one great professional describing another: 'He appears totally relaxed, yet he never drops his guard. He is like a leopard; he never completely switches off.' Jackman himself, as these writings show, is no less observant.

Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia by Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Rausing's Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia details her anthropological fieldwork during 1993 and 1994 in Noarootsi, a former Soviet military zone in recently independent Estonia. It's a place full of ghosts, not only of Stalinism but also of the Holocaust. Thoughtful, curious and a little bewildered, Rausing captures a country in rapid transition. Returning a decade later, she finds all has changed: there are mobile phones, shopping centres, management consultants. In a book full of lyrical moments, the most moving section is her attempt to capture the odd, not entirely comprehensible sense of nostalgia that this engenders.

The Bookshop That Floated Away is Sarah Henshaw's tale of travelling the canals of Britain trying to sell books from a barge. This is funny and cleverly written - perhaps the first post-modernist take on canals - and uncovers strange destinations such as the underground car park in Leeds where you can also moor your boat, and the pub in Nottingham where the canal runs inside, allowing one to slide in for a pint. As for the barge itself, it's still just about in business, somewhere near Stoke-on-Trent, having chugged about 1,000 miles and sold roughly the same number of books.

Kolyma is the ice-throttled expanse of tundra in north-east Siberia that housed many of the Soviet gulags; it's still a cruel place, its brutish settlements connected only by a single 2,000km highway, a road built on permafrost. This is what Polish journalist Jacek Hugo-Bader travels on, seeking out stories. His Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia's Haunted Hinterland is peopled by miners and hunters, truckers and scrap-metal dealers, police and thieves, and the children of political prisoners. In one scene, a Colonel in the secret police goes on a vodka-and-cards bender with his counterpart in the underworld, reviving the old Stalinist alliance. In another, comically, an oligarch will not drop his illusion that Hugo-Bader is a Polish intelligence agent. Powerful stuff, written by a man who seems to be the natural heir to Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski.

The fascinating story of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the writer, archaeologist, civil servant and spy who did as much as TE Lawrence to stamp British influence on the Middle East, begins with the adventures recorded in Persian Pictures, first published in 1894. The book describes a young woman's journey to visit her uncle in Tehran. Preoccupied by the image of the 'garden in the desert' that she has read about in Persian poetry, she seeks out imams and merchant princes and the camps of nomad shepherds. Meanwhile, cholera approaches Tehran, eventually sweeping through the city, like a forerunner of political and religious storms to come.

Ought one walk alone? Nietzsche, Thoreau and Rousseau all thought so. These are among the many writers discussed in Frédéric Gros's A Philosophy Of Walking. For Gros, it isn't just a matter of finding your own rhythm on a solitary walk, or of being more in sympathy with nature, but that a special relationship evolves between mind and body. Other topics include 'freedom', 'slowness' and 'pilgrimage'; the last is a hot theme in publishing, with new books about routes such as the Camino de Santiago in Spain and 'the pilgrim diet'. You heard it here first.

For a typically Anglophone narrative showing what it's like to walk in practice, with reportage, history and memoir, Patrick Baker's The Cairngorms:A Secret History is perfect. Describing walks which trace the routes of streams and rivers, reveal jewel mines and uncover wrecked aircraft, he takes us across the landscape of Britain's last great wilderness, travelling back and forth in time and space. Some of the best moments are when Baker explores ruined bothies and rough shelters called 'howffs', full of the ghosts of walkers past.

It seems incredible that Norman Lewis, whom literary critic Cyril Connolly described as being so a good stylist as to make a lorry interesting, has been dead for over 10 years. He seemed like one of those writers who would go on for ever, and in a way he did, producing remarkable travel books and novels over the course of 40 years. Among his last works was 1993's An Empire Of The East: Three Journeys Into Indonesia, which recounts trips to Sumatra, East Timor and Irian Jaya with his son Gawaine and Gawaine's friend Robin. Now reissued, it tells of the decimation of the rainforests and of domination by Javanese generals. Yet what you take away from it is the wryness of incidental observation. There's a very funny moment when three veiled Islamic girls, descending from a four-wheel-drive, wolf-whistle at Gawaine and Robin.